I'm curious if the delay in starting that you're experiencing is related to your USB mouse - the string of messages at the end aren't printed out by the NVIDIA driver. I don't know if that could cause a long delay in startup, but it's worth disabling to see if it has any effect. Other than those messages, I don't see anything that would indicate an immediate problem.

If the USB thing is a red herring, then my next suggestion would be to visit your card vendor's website to see if there's a vbios update available for your card.

Originally posted by Andy Mecham I'm curious if the delay in starting that you're experiencing is related to your USB mouse - the string of messages at the end aren't printed out by the NVIDIA driver. I don't know if that could cause a long delay in startup, but it's worth disabling to see if it has any effect. Other than those messages, I don't see anything that would indicate an immediate problem.

If the USB thing is a red herring, then my next suggestion would be to visit your card vendor's website to see if there's a vbios update available for your card.

I remembered one thing - with default Slackware 9.0 kernel everything worked fine, X was starting without delays, etc. But this kernel is optimized only for 486. So a made a custom kernel with Athlon optimizations. After this I began to experience these annoying delays. But seriously I don't think, that Athlon optimized kernel could cause delays. My guess is that there are issues with AMD processors or VIA chipsets in these new Nvidia drivers. On the other hand, a lot of people say that detection of a monitor causes this delay, but this delay also appears while switching back from a console to X. As far as I understand, this not the case of detection, because monitor is already detected during startup, so there is no need to probe for it everytime you switch back from a console.

Andy, I think you already know, that this is a serious problem. I mean, there are hundreds of posts in this forum about the same problem. WHAT can be a cause of it? Nobody knows

One more thing. I NEVER experienced this delay with any Nvidia driver on Slackware 7.x, 8.x, Debian (woody), Redhat 8.0, 9. So that leads to another guess - gcc issues? Slackware 9.0 uses gcc 3.2.2 to build a driver, because Nvidia doesn't provide precompiled drivers for Slackware systems. I had Debian (woody) with gcc 3.2. There were also no precompiled drivers for this system, so gcc 3.2 was used to build a driver and it worked just fine. I wonder, what gcc version was used to build a RH 9 driver, which is available from Nvidia? Andy, maybe you guys at Nvidia can build a driver for Slackware 9.0 systems?

I remembered one thing - with default Slackware 9.0 kernel everything worked fine, X was starting without delays, etc. But this kernel is optimized only for 486. So a made a custom kernel with Athlon optimizations. After this I began to experience these annoying delays. But seriously I don't think, that Athlon optimized kernel could cause delays.

No, it's certainly possible. What exactly did you enable? Can you attach your .config so I can try it here?

Quote:

Andy, I think you already know, that this is a serious problem. I mean, there are hundreds of posts in this forum about the same problem. WHAT can be a cause of it? Nobody knows

Most of these "hundreds of posts" (actually much less than that ) were caused by bad vbioses - this problem has been worked around, and people should contact their card vendor for vbios udates.

Quote:

The problem is that I don't know the vendor of my card. How can I determine that? And where can I find more info about upgrading Geforce vbios?

If you bought the card at retail, it should say somewhere on the card itself. If you bought the card as part of a complete system, you'll need to contact the company you bought the system from for that information. However, I now doubt that your problem is related to your vbios.

So what become of this? I (had) have the same problem. Strange thing is, it was like this when I used Mandrake too. This is inclusive of the previous driver release as well. It's been some time now I've been stumped on this.

Bright side was it forced me to get real quick with command line tools and commands.......

I am stumped and if there is a solution to this than state it and count on a contribution. If not and you want to state how "HARD" slackware is on a newbie that count on your firewall being busy and count your prayers that you are as good as you think you are. I am at my wits end with people assuming things. Help and be helped in return $$ or keep your your thoughts to yourselves.